Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) is a statistical machine learning (SML) technique that uses statistical models to generate translations from one language to another. In this paper, I describe the statistical machine translation (SMT) approach that I am using to make an English to Kinyarwanda translator, and explain the phrase-based model used in some of the most prominent SMT systems such as Cdec, Joshua, and Moses. The latter SMT system being the one I am using to develop my English to Kinyarwanda translation model.